Vehicle telematics is generally known as technology that integrates use of telecommunications and information processing within a vehicle. One practical application of vehicle telematics is the use of automatic emergency notification in the event of an emergency incident. For example, when an emergency incident occurs, the vehicle telematics technology will recognize that a predefined criteria has occurred, such as an airbag deployment, and immediately send a telecommunications signal to a remote facility. The remote facility, such as a call center, will process the information received from the vehicle telematics and alert the appropriate authorities, such as the police dispatch center, emergency medical services (EMS) dispatch center, and/or fire house dispatch center. The appropriate authorities will then direct the emergency responders, such as police, firefighters, and/or EMS, to the vehicle which sent the emergency notification.
The emergency notification process as described above, however, has a cycle time from when the vehicle telematics sends the emergency signal to when emergency responders in the field are informed about the emergency situation. As a result, emergency responders located within a short proximity to emergency situation but unaware of the distressed vehicle will not respond until the notification cycle is complete. It may be advantageous to have emergency responders arrive more quickly to the location of the emergency situation by reducing or eliminating this cycle time. By arriving sooner, the emergency responders may be able to more effectively assess and react to the pending emergency situation.
Therefore, it may be desirable for the distressed vehicle to be configured to send an enhanced emergency distress signal that may inform emergency responders located in proximity to the emergency situation without the need for the signal to be processed by a remote facility, such as a call center.